The Pomp Podcast - #484: Nik Bhatia on Counterparty Free Money

Episode Date: February 3, 2021

Nik Bhatia is the author of the new book, Layered Money. He is an Adjunct Professor of Finance and Business Economics at USC Marshall. In this conversation, we discuss an overview of the monetary system, layered money, the recent OCC ruling, coexistence between bitcoin and CBDCs, and counterparty free money. ======================= The Stacks 2.0 mainnet launched on January 14, 2021. Stacks, which you may recognize as Blockstack, is a layer-1 blockchain that uses the Bitcoin blockchain as a secure base-layer and enables developers to harness its power in new ways. Stacks makes Bitcoin more than digital gold, enabling apps and smart contracts on Bitcoin--unlocking innovation, new value, and a new way to earn BTC. Visit http://www.stacks.co for more information. ======================= Coinbase Wallets are adding support for .crypto and .zil domains through their partnership with Unstoppable Domains. Unstoppable Domains provides an all-in-one solution for blockchain domains. You can send money using these new domains instead of long Bitcoin wallet addresses, while also storing your domain in Coinbase's collectibles section. Go to unstoppabledomains.com in the dapp browser to register and manage your domains.  ======================= As one of the largest and oldest Bitcoin exchanges in the world, Kraken is consistently named one of the best places to buy and sell crypto online, thanks to our excellent service, low fees, versatile funding options and rigorous security standards -- but this is only part of the story. We’ve been on the forefront of the blockchain revolution since 2011: http://www.kraken.com =======================

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Let's kick this thing off. Nick Bhatia is the author of the new book, Layered Money. He's an adjunct professor of finance and business economics at USC Marshall. In this conversation, we discuss an overview of the monetary system, layered money, the recent OCC ruling, coexistence between Bitcoin and central bank digital currencies, and counterparty free money. I really enjoyed this conversation with Nick, and I think you will as well. Before we get into this episode, though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors. First up is Blockstack. Apps and smart contracts are

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One of the largest and oldest Bitcoin exchanges in the world, Kraken. Consistently named one of the best places to buy and sell crypto online. Head on over to Kraken.com. Again, that is Kraken.com. All right, let's get into this episode with Nick. I hope you enjoy this one. Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not

reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got a special treat for you here today. Nick is with us. Thank you so much for doing this, sir. Thanks, Pomp. I appreciate it, man. Absolutely. Let's just jump right into your background. Obviously, you wrote the new book, Layered Money. But before you did that, kind of walk us through where you grew up, how you got into teaching, and then also how you discovered Bitcoin.

Yeah, so I'm born and raised here in L.A., and I started working on a U.S. Treasury's trading desk several years ago. And that was always my goal was to work in the financial markets at a very high level. And I got to work on a treasuries desk, trading billions of notional value of treasuries, almost on a daily basis. And I was really in my element on a desk. I got to be a global macro thinker, work in interest rate strategy and help my asset manager invest on behalf of our clients. And that was really great for me. Well, while I was on the desk, I started hearing a lot more about Bitcoin. And this was around 2016. So Bitcoin had already been in the headlines over the past couple of years at that point. But it wasn't something that I had ever taken seriously or actually looked into. I had never read the white paper, et cetera. But 2016 was the year when I did all that. And, uh, while I was on the desk, um, doing my global macroeconomic study

and trading, I was also on the side falling down the Bitcoin rabbit hole. And, you know, that came with reading, mastering Bitcoin, which a lot of it was over my head because computer science textbook, but, you know, I did try to understand Bitcoin as deeply as I could as a software, not just as this new speculative asset, but, you know, really the fundamentals of what it was. And so in 2016, that happened. And over the past few years, my attention and my mindshare just gravitated more and more toward Bitcoin. But the goal with Layered Money, my book, was to write something that really bridges my two worlds. So this world of treasuries and traditional finance and investment management and this new exciting technology of Bitcoin

and how to explain Bitcoin to people from my old world and using that type of language. And becoming an adjunct professor at USC happened over the last couple of years where I had the opportunity to guest lecture there. And then they graciously invited me to teach the fixed income course. So what I teach at USC is the bond market. I don't teach, Bitcoin is not part of that class. But I do hope to add something at USC where I am teaching Bitcoin as well. But I wrote the book, again, for both worlds, the traditional finance world, the people who are interested in Bitcoin, but maybe don't know anything about it and want a traditional finance person to walk answer. Yeah. It makes so much sense too, right? Is you've got to have an understanding of the

legacy financial system in order to understand kind of this new financial system that's being built. I want to jump in. Most of the book or a good portion of the book is really explaining to people the monetary system and doing it in kind of plain English so that anyone can understand it. Let's just start with like a monetary policy or a monetary system 101, right? Like everyone hears about monetary policy, they hear about interest rates, they hear about all this stuff, but they don't actually understand how the system works. And so when somebody says to you, like, what is the monetary system? And how does it work? What's the way that you explain it to them normally? Yeah, so I think that what I do in layered money is I outlined this three layered model for

understanding how our current monetary system works. The actor between the first and the second layer is the Federal Reserve. What do they own? They own U.S. Treasuries. So U.S. Treasuries exist as the first layer of money in my framework. And what do they issue? What's on their liability side? They issue bank reserves and they issue cash so that those two forms of money are second layer money. So you and I, if we want access to second layer money, we would have to have dollar bills in our pocket, right? We don't have access to the Fed's reserves. Only banks do. And therefore, between the second and the third layer of money exists commercial banks. And those banks basically have Fed reserves as their assets, and they issue deposits as liabilities. Those

deposits are the money that you and I have in our checking account. So when we have checking account dollars, those are actually forms of a third layer money, again, in this framework. And so this difference between first, second, and third layer money is not something that's a commonplace terminology. But what I've tried to do is explain money in this approachable pyramid type of way. And I have graphics throughout the book that show actually the layers of money and how they evolved throughout time, starting several centuries ago. And so that's what I try to do here is explain money in this first, second, and third layer way in which people can understand that the form of money that they carry around is actually a third layer money. And it shows people how far

removed they are from hard money. And hard money opens up a whole different topic where we can debate US treasuries versus gold versus Bitcoin. But I think that's the right context to think about Bitcoin is versus gold and US treasuries, not versus Fed reserves, not versus cash, and definitely not versus commercial banking deposits, which most people, the average American has as their money. Why is it so important to be closest to the hard money, right? So in this case, treasuries? Like, why is that so important? And why does that come with so much kind of power and influence and really wealth generation? It all comes down to counterparty risk. And what we have in our financial system today is a lot of forms of money are exposure,

direct exposure to some counterparty, whether that be a bank, an asset manager, or some sort of money market fund, we all, when we carry our money market funds or our checking account dollars, we all have this counterparty exposure to these single bank entities, which we have seen over the last decade and a half are very vulnerable to failure and would have failed if not for the unlimited backstop and bailouts that have come from the Fed and other central banks around the world. So the answer to your question is, it's really important to be as close as we can to a counterparty-free type of money so that we avoid all the risk embedded in the system. And just because your bank will be bailed out tomorrow if they fail doesn't mean that's a good reason to hold that bank's deposit as money.

We have to hedge that risk. We have to hedge away the counterparty exposure. And so when people buy United States treasuries as the risk-free, and I use that in quotes, the risk-free asset of the dollar spectrum, they're doing so because the US government is the most counterparty, it's the most worthy counterparty that exists, no matter how you want to slice it, because it's always relative to the banking system. So then if we progress away from the dollar-centric system, that's when people start to buy gold and Bitcoin as hedges away from counterparty risk altogether, because we know that when you buy a treasury, you have counterparty exposure to the US government. Now, the U.S. government has never failed on that obligation, which is why people feel comfortable using the term risk free. But we do know that there there's a denomination risk there and, you know, there is still a political risk there. So gold and Bitcoin provide that alternative. And Bitcoin, you know, I think you and I are on the same page here that Bitcoin provides the ultimate hedge away from the dollar denomination.

It doesn't mean the dollar is going to collapse tomorrow. It just means it's a way to avoid the exposure to the dollar. Yeah. And what's so interesting to me is this idea of the treasuries being hard money and really it's a counterparty game, right? So I am betting that the least likely to fail or the least likely to put me in a position to be screwed is the US government, right? And I think that people don't quite understand like what would have to be true for that perspective

to be inaccurate or to fail as a thesis. I don't want to spend a ton of time on that. But maybe just help folks understand outside of the United States where maybe their government is not as sought after and trusted and kind of believed in. We've seen where the quote unquote hard money of a other economy or another monetary system has failed. And so walk through maybe kind of like what is the anatomy of when that happens, right? So kind of in the absolute worst case scenario, if what you deem to be the hard money or you deem to be that risk-free money actually ends up failing, what does that look like? Well, what it looks like is that your purchasing power disappears. So if you didn't have something as the alternative, like physical US dollars,

Federal Reserve notes, this second layer of money that I talk about as cash, people abroad in countries that don't have very credit worthy governments, they actually hold physical US dollars to hedge against that type of collapse. And so if they didn't hold dollars or some sort of precious metal or some hard asset, their purchasing power completely disappears and they're basically going to suffer whatever consequences their government hands down in the transition to the next monetary system. So that's why the dollar is so valuable on a worldwide basis outside of the United States, because it does provide that safety mechanism for people. Yeah. And so when we start to think about there's kind of, quote, unquote, risk-free

or better counterparties rather than non-attractive counterparties, that all seems to be in the fiat monetary system. You've got this idea of a counterparty-free money, though, which is Bitcoin. Describe the difference structurally between a good counterparty, kind of that risk-free situation, with actual just no counterparty or counterparty-free. Right. So think of a treasury bond, a US treasury bond, as a piece of paper. With that piece of paper gives you the power to redeem every interest payment and redeem the par payment at maturity. That's what a bond is. In that scenario, you still have to take your piece of paper to the treasury to get cash back for it. So you are exposed to a counterparty. That counterparty is the US government.

But if you hold Bitcoin or gold, which is an important example to bring in here just to make to illustrate it. If you have a gold coin in your pocket or a Bitcoin private key, which we know is a number, you can have the number written down and put in your left pocket and the gold coin in your right pocket. Neither one of those things has exposure to anybody defaulting. The gold coin has value because people will pay for it. They will pay you something else, another form of cash for it. The Bitcoin private key, same thing. The treasury bond doesn't have that intrinsic value because it eventually needs to be redeemed for cash. And so that's what I mean by a counterparty free money. Bitcoin is like any commodity where if you hold it, you have it. And nobody like

cattle is a commodity. If you have cattle in your ranch, nobody can default that cattle. to you. The cattle is on your property and you own it. And Bitcoin private keys are numbers and they're a virtual commodity in the same way as any other commodities, as we call it, a bearer asset. When you think through kind of the implications for this, let's talk just in the short term on an individual level. What is the advantage and why are people flocking to this versus kind of that risk-free or some of the other bad counterparty examples that we talked about? I think the answer to that largely comes down to the politics and geopolitics that we see today in the world. There's an inherent distrust of government around the world,

and there is empirical data that shows governments and central banks show no restraint when it comes to bailouts. And so that type of wealth transfer, that type of money creation, and it's a wealth transfer from party A to party B, but it's also wealth transfer from the future to today because taxpayers foot that bill. All of those things are driving people to find a form of money that doesn't have anything to do with a politician. And Bitcoin gives them that solution. Bitcoin gives them that power. And we in the West, in the United States, we're not intimately familiar with this idea that our currency could be worth nothing tomorrow. If we zoom out far enough, okay, we can have that healthy fear and have a good sense of history. But if you think about people in certain countries in Latin America, they have that fear today, right now. And if they can find a way to rid their current money and accumulate Bitcoin, private keys to their smartphone wallet, to their hardware wallet, to any form of custody, self-custody, they are doing their future self a great service by doing that today.

And that's also fear-driven. That's not speculative-driven like a lot of people are doing. And I know that your clients, a lot of them are trying to get in for the technology. They're trying to build products. And they're also trying to speculate that this is going to be the winning technology out there. People in Latin America, they're not speculating on which technology is going to win. They know Bitcoin has market value. They know it has worldwide liquidity and they want it as their primary form of money. And so we really have to step into the shoes of people abroad to empathize with them about why they want Bitcoin. Yeah. And it's really fascinating to me when you then go from the individuals. So let's say maybe we move kind of along the spectrum of organizations to now we get to the banks and the financial institutions, right? So we're still not talking about the governments and the central banks. We're not talking about individuals either. What's the advantage to them, right? We saw the recent OCC announcement, for example, that really said, hey, banks, you can custody these assets. You don't just have to custody those kind of quote unquote risk free or counterparty money. You now can actually go ahead and do it with this counterparty free money. So what's the impact on those financial institutions? What the OCC just said was basically that you can now use Bitcoin and associated technologies for value transfer between yourselves in the banking system.

So the rails themselves to the banking system, where we're used to SWIFT and what we call Fedwire, these ways that banks send messages to each other in order to transact, they can now replace that completely with Bitcoin and their own stablecoin crypto infrastructure. And I mean, that is incredibly powerful. You know, as long as they follow the banking law, was what the ruling said. As long as you follow banking law, you can use Bitcoin to transfer money back and forth to each other. And whether they want to denominate it in Bitcoin

on their own balance sheet or strike everything in dollars when they transfer, it doesn't really matter. The truth is now that Bitcoin is starting to replace Swift and cryptocurrency technology is replacing this old messaging technology that the financial system is heavily reliant upon. So it is a very powerful thing. And it doesn't directly impact, I would say, the demand for Bitcoin explicitly, this ruling. But what it does impact is, first of all,

it's a green light from the United States government that says, you can use Bitcoin. you can use these types of technologies. They now call it independent node verification network of IVN, whatever, INVN. And so these INVNs, now the government has a way to describe Bitcoin in their own vernacular. These INVNs, like Bitcoin, can be used legally. And it says a lot about how banks are going to deal with this technology in the future. Yeah, it's absolutely fascinating. If we kind of continue down this path, eventually we end up at central banks and kind of fiat governments. And what I think most people have thought for a while is central bank digital currencies will be the response to Bitcoin and other kind of crypto assets.

The central bank digital currencies appear not to be different in monetary policy. They appear to be the same monetary policies, just in a new technology form factor. So in some ways, it's kind of putting lipstick on a pig. Do we get in a world where there's coexistence between CBDCs and Bitcoin? Do we get in a world where Bitcoin replaces the fiat currencies and central banks have to adopt Bitcoin? Do we see a world where fiat currencies are now pegged to Bitcoin? And like, how do you just see this playing out in the two worlds of central bank digital currencies and Bitcoin colliding, coexisting or kind of however we end up there? Yeah, so I definitely think that they are going to coexist. And the conclusion of my book is called Freedom of Currency Denomination, where it's an idealistic view of the future in which people can hold Bitcoin as a neutral counterparty free money.

They will hold central bank digital currency because it's the currency they receive benefits in and pay taxes with. And they'll also hold stable coins or other bank-issued liabilities in order to get membership rewards, in order to accrue interest to themselves. So I do view the future as a world in which a lot of currencies can coexist. exist. And I do think that central bank digital currency, so there are a couple of things there. Let's talk first about what CBDCs will look like. And are they actually an invention in monetary policy? Or no, are they just a lipstick on a pig like you described? Well, if they come in the form of wholesale money, which is like Fed reserves, money that they issue to banks, then you're absolutely right. There's no innovation there. It's just replacing one tool with another that

mirrors each other. However, if they issue a retail-facing CBDC, which is like digital cash that you and I can hold in our JP Morgan Chase app digital wallet, where we can have FedCoins in there. And I do think that that will eventually happen in the United States and in other currencies, even if the wholesale option is done first in order to test the technology. In the future, if that is the case and people are able to have CBDC in their wallet, Bitcoin in their wallet, and bank coins in their wallet all at the same time, then we will have a world in which Bitcoin is the true ultimate form of digital scarcity. and all other forms of money will find their base price in Bitcoin, including central bank

digital currencies. And so then one other aspect of your question is, will central bank liabilities and digital currencies be pegged to Bitcoin? Yes, I do believe in some countries they will do that. Well, they'll have a portfolio of Bitcoin and their open market operations will be basically buying and selling Bitcoin for their CBDC to try to maintain a peg. And I do think that that is possible and likely in the future. And remember, we have a couple hundred central banks around the world or over 100 central banks. So we are going to get different responses. And I'm excited to see which central banks are going to pave the way. We all know that the Fed will be slower than the rest to act. They'll, you know, it looks like they're going to be last of the big

countries and the big central banks to enter this arena. But, you know, it'll be interesting to see how it all unfolds. One of the things I've been thinking a lot about, and I don't know necessarily if I have complete thoughts fleshed out, but is obvious to me, at least where we stand today, is you, I, and most people around the world live in a single currency kind of environment, right? I get paid in the US dollar, I save in the US dollar, I invest in dollar denominated assets, I pay my taxes in dollars, like my life is in dollars. And if I'm going to leave geographically the United States, and maybe go somewhere else, for an everyday citizen, I will exchange my dollars into that local currency, I'll do that at the bank or through a currency exchange or at the

airport. But that's basically kind of my life as a single currency. Part of that is because I get paid in it and the assets around the earth are nominated in it and taxes are paid in it. But another part of it is that there's actually a very high switching cost between going from dollars to anything else. I got to go to the bank or I have to go to that currency exchanger. When we have CBDCs across the world, so every currency is digitized, whether it's dollars, euros, yen, RMB, whatever you kind of can pick, the friction goes down drastically, almost to zero. Because now with the click of a button, I can switch from dollars to any other currency, whether it be a decentralized kind of digital currency like Bitcoin, a private currency, maybe like Libra,

or a state nation state backed currency, like a digital euro, for example. What impact does that have on life for an everyday person, right? When all of a sudden the switching costs drops dramatically, and you can live a multi currency life rather than a single currency life. Like, is that a material and function point in any way? Or is that something where theoretically, yes, that will be possible, but most people will still just kind of live their life in a single currency and most things won't change? Well, I agree with you. I think that it's a very powerful development that will happen. And what we'll see is that all digital currencies worth their while will have interoperability with Bitcoin at the very minimum via the lightning

network with atomic swaps. And so we'll be able to instantly transfer or exchange one Bitcoin for everything else in the digital spectrum and vice versa. And that will empower this dual denomination where I don't think people will have several denominations, but they will have two. They'll have their home and they'll have Bitcoin. And I think that a lot of Bitcoiners are already starting to think in a dual-denominated way. We can see that corporate treasurers are starting to think in a dual-denominated way. And as long as these digital currencies keep developing on this track where they'll have this interoperability with Lightning network and atomic swaps, I think all of that will continue and friction will reduce like you

described. And it's a world where people are a lot more mobile with their money. And in layered money, I do describe this as a map, as a topography. And we have to be able to navigate between monies in the future. That's not, like you were saying, that's not something that people ever thought about 10 years ago is that, oh, you know, how should I think in two different denominations at the same time? But, you know, Bitcoin and this ability to exchange traditional currencies for cryptocurrencies in the future does enable all of that. For sure. Before we wrap up, I want to kind of zoom out for a second and look forward 25 plus years. Bitcoin seems to structurally be set up in a way where as more and more people adopt it, you'll get more liquidity. As you get more liquidity,

you'll get more utility. And so it's kind of just getting started in many ways. There's also plenty of alarm bells and kind of red flags in the legacy system, whether it's in the United States or elsewhere. Again, kind of just structurally the way that the monetary system is set up, it appears not to be overly sustainable, especially when humans can continue to intervene and manipulate markets and systems. Where do you see us 25 plus years from now, right? So kind of, I think, in long term, what does that world look like to you? Or what are you hoping that we can kind of achieve? I think that we will get back to an era in which Bitcoin, like gold in the past, is the true neutral settlement mechanism of the world. And all currencies that exist today

will likely exist. So let me hedge that a little bit. I think fewer currencies will exist in 25 years government currencies that exist today uh bitcoin will exist and will be the dominant uh most desired reserve asset uh regardless of country or or anything it'll be the most desired in the world and you'll also have you know a free market for other currencies there'll be cryptocurrencies stable coins issued by banks stable coins issued by corporations um other types of tokens that are issued by entities that don't necessarily fall into any jurisdiction anymore, other forms of decentralized currencies. I think all these currencies will exist with each other.

We'll have less government currencies. The dollar, the euro will still exist. The renminbi will still exist. They'll all be digital. They'll all be digitized. And Bitcoin will be that measuring stick for every single currency in the digital realm. And I do feel that Bitcoin will reach some sort of steady state in terms of its overall market capitalization somewhere in the many trillions, 10 plus trillion as we get there. And we can use the size of the stock market, the real estate market as context for that. Not everybody is going to sell their apartment buildings for Bitcoin.

Not everybody's going to sell their gold for Bitcoin. Not everyone's going to sell their stocks for Bitcoin. And people are going to sell their Bitcoin for all those other things as the price rises. So there'll be an equilibrium. And that will take, I think, about 25 years to get to. Got it. where can we send people to find uh the book layered money okay so layered money i got it right here it's a short read guys um you'll get through it in one day if you focus on it um

i you can find it on amazon layered money uh you can find me at layeredmoney.com and i have the links to amazon worldwide and other places um so please go check out the book you can follow me on Twitter at time value of BTC. But I really hope that you'll go read the book. It's on Kindle and in paperback and hardcover. And I know there are a lot of audio book people out there. The demand is insane. The number of requests for the audio book, the audio book is coming. It'll be out in a couple of weeks. So stay tuned for that. You'll be able to find it on audible. But right now, just the print and the ebook for you guys. The audio book folks are absolute savages. They They do not relent, dude.

They do not relent. Before I let you go, I always ask everyone the same three questions and you'll get to ask me one at the end. The first question is, what's the most important book that you've ever read? And you can't say your own book, but what's the most important book you've ever read?

Yeah, so I'm gonna give a shout out to Jim Rickard's Currency Wars. This is a book that I read in 2010, 2011, when QE was just getting underway and it really helped me see the history of the dollar and gold and its importance. Um, so, uh, you know, a lot of respect for that book in, in opening my eyes in a lot of ways about the monetary system. Amazing. Uh, second question is a little bit more personal. It's about your sleep schedule. And this question is brought to

you by our friends at eight sleep. Uh, the founder Mateo, he, uh, he hounded me until I started to sleep more and they've got this like thermoregulated bed, which basically just means it keeps it really cool for you. Uh, and it helps you sleep better. Uh, my life got changed when I started to sleep more. Are you somebody who sleeps three or four hours or are you somebody who sleeps like 10 hours? How do you kind of put yourself in that spectrum? No, I get a good seven, eight hours of sleep. Um, definitely an early riser at being in LA in the bond market. I had to be on the desk at five 30. So I had to be up at about four 15 and I still, I'm not up at four 15 every day, but I'm still up before five most days. And I'm, I'm to bed early to make sure I get a full night

sleep. Not when I was writing the book though. I was up, I was up till past midnight, which is late for me because I still get up at five. So past midnight, every night trying to hammer this thing out. Got to get your sleep, man. I'm a believer. I feel like I'm an evangelist for sleep now after, after getting eight hours every night for so long, if I get like seven, I'm like, oh man, I'm, I'm feeling it. Uh, third question. And then you'll get to ask me one is a more fun aliens. Are you a believer or a non-believer? Uh, definitely a believer in aliens. Um, not based on physical evidence, but just on the probabilities. What do you think is more likely that, uh, they just exist somewhere out there and it's not like

the green men in the movies and you know, who knows what it could literally just be, uh, um, you know, kind of the equivalent of like a worm or stuff like that? Or do you think that it's more likely that, uh, some of these conspiracy theories about, uh, spacecrafts or UFOs or whatever, uh, are true? I think it's more likely that, uh, that our species has had an interaction with aliens than, than you think. So I think it's more likely that than, um, than not. And that's just kind of based on these, uh, drawings and things from, you know, the Hindu religion, uh, with flying chariots and things like that. So, you know, maybe thousands of years ago we did have some interaction.

Yeah. Absolutely wild. If we could confirm that for sure. You can ask me one question to finish it up. What you got for me? Okay. So when, when you go on CNBC and you're on fast money with these guys, and I know that it's your mission to, to keep your cool. and what, what has been the closest you've ever been to being totally triggered and just like losing it for the, maybe the anti-Bitcoin propaganda that might come from the network sometimes. I've never even come close, uh, which may be surprising to some people. So the one

secret that I have is, uh, I grew up in a family with four younger brothers. So there's five boys in my family. Uh, and people always ask me, they're like, Hey, you know, one, how do you keep it cool to like, how do you have such like kind of witty immediate responses? And I'm like, it's basically like me and my brothers just talking shit to each other. Like, like if you put us all in a room and we all start talking, like literally it's just snark and like everyone is just kind of zinging each other. And so when you get on television, like it's pretty similar, right? It's just maybe I don't know them as well. And maybe, you know, you got to kind of not curse And there's some boundaries to it. But to me, it's more of like a game a little bit, right? Like, I don't take anything that they say. Personally, I don't think they take anything that I say personally. Generally, now, most of the hosts, for the most part, like they're actually pretty positive and welcoming when it comes to Bitcoin.

And so I think that like one, the sentiments change, that makes it easier. Two is you have to remember, it's like entertainment as well. Like, you know, Kevin O'Leary, and I have gotten to know each other, and he's fantastic. And I really enjoy kind of spending time with them. But then, you know, he'll tell me before we go do it, he'll be like, and don't worry, I'm going to treat you like the little, you know, rat that you are tomorrow. And it's like, okay. And so, you know, you got to just remember, like, it's fun. I have a blast doing it. So I keep doing it. And so I think it's less, it's less likely you become triggered and upset when you kind of keep that mentality. Yeah, well, you do a great job. And you set a good example for all of us. I appreciate it very much so all right let's send people if you want I've actually got the PDF version

I read through the book it's fantastic Layered Money please go get the book just google it go to Amazon or you can go to is it layeredmoney.com

is that correct? that's right layeredmoney.com all right man listen Nick thank you so much for doing this we're going to have to do it again in the future thanks Pomp

I appreciate it